Better to Strangle a Baby in its Cradle

Burmese Box

2005-06-03T02:13:00.000-03:00

When in Prome, do as the Burmans. Or so goes the old adage.

---

Instead of heeding such wise advice I chose to saunter down through colonial Rangoon to the meat markets, where my unfortunate poltroonery purchased me much more than a happy ending on a massage table - I was cleaved, to be sure, and left out to dry like so many prawns on houseboat rooftops, just another expatriate forced into southasian depravity by a mob of coolies and mustachioed colonists.

---

And how I wanted to holler at first! Those bronzed people fingering me at every turn with sandalwood and sage, underneath blossomy longhis they chased after me with promises of marionettes and naked cock fights. Wandering along half-drunk on Mandalay Rum through the white marbles of the Schwe Dagon pagoda I saw swastikas and gongs and I let the rain penetrate deep and far - I was soaked to the bone in spring rolls, butterfish, and Kingfisher. Under smoky pavilions images of Buddha reclined for hundreds of yards with symbols on the soles that lept at me, hauntingly, like pouncing tigers.

---

Later, in Mandalay, the sweat slicked off me as I slept for days. The swoon of the golden triangle swept through me as I gazed towards the Shah, and in a blanket of poppies I rested by an ancient stupa.

---

And now, years later, the moon glimmers through the lacquer on my Burmese box and I sigh with anxiety...once again I sit on by the banks of the Ayrwaddy at Bagan and quaff sloe gin fizz to drown the pain...once again I gaze out to those far mountains and fade away in a snowy cloud of pink poppies. Once again, I see how I left a little piece of me there when I was cleaved by Kipling's hot knife, when I was wrought by Maugham's plague and Flashman's fears.

BLOOD

"'Do you like Kipling?' Harry says to Somerset. Somerset replies, as a quip, 'I don't know. I've never kippled.' According to BLOOD, this is the way it was in Myanmar - Colonial quiddities, decadent drinks, sacrosanct sentimentality, and silly souvenirs (such as the Burmese Box). Of course we all desire travel, but not so many wish to be barbequed on Buddhist lent in Burma, as BLOOD experienced. Such fun! Such Heideggerian exstase! Such glee!" --Eds

Decades

2005-05-26T02:42:00.000-03:00

DECADENT LODGE MINUTES, MAY 2005 (HALIFAX) - Graduation Remarks by The Right Honourable Chief Minister of Suet and Viscera, Dr. Paul S. Blood, VC, KCB, KCIE, QC

It's been decades, and yet the time still flies. Here we are again, all together 'neath these fair laurels, once again crowded shoulder to shoulder by the banks of this strange river, this bizarre crick that is our very own Lethe.

Well, don't mind me boys! Bend over and take a sip! Who cares if it's a little brackish? This water represents the blood that courses through us and keeps after us like a taskmaster with a whip. This water is our blood. Let it nourish you, mates.

Let us look down upon the swirls and eddies, those curling wisps of life that bounce through the rapids and gush through the flats, and let us feel truly alive. For it was us, boys, it was us who did it right, did it true, and did it well!

We gaze down upon those pale foams and dark rocks and waves of ecstasy wash over us. We are the chosen few, the faithful selected that have the honest holy light shine down upon our reckonings. We are the future!

Let it take you away boys. Let it take you along its own course. So long and farewell. To the end, my lads, to the end. Hear! Hear!

PROGNOSTICATION: BLOOD

"STUART J. MINT (nee WOODS) was set to pursue a masters degree in comparative literature at the Universite de Montreal in French and English. He rejected those charges, and opted instead for a life of opulence in a majestic South End Halifax flat.

KATHRYN ROSE (nee SIEGEL) fights for her rights to write her thesis. Not content with the nautical ways of Halifax, she has decided to move to the big city for a storied career in vandalism and petty theft. Hurrah!

PAUL S. BLOOD (nee BROOKER), unwilling to participate in the underwhelming rigours of the academy, has chosen to pursue the most direct route to his fate: Master of Fine Arts in literature. Loser." -Eds

When Feelings are Perfectly Normal

2005-05-02T13:48:00.000-03:00

By Kathryn Rose, B.A.

When my mother first saw Martha, she said: "That girl's just asking for it."

The day was hot and dizzy--all car fumes and liquid asphalt and hot, barf-smelling upholstery. We were sitting in the car at the corner of Young and Eglinton, in front of the Cinemax, idling. There were lots of kids around. The boys were getting high in the alley, and the girls looked slutty in big slut boots. The gutters were filthy with gum and other debris.

My mother said: "This neighbourhood is going down hill." She had immaculate hands with capable fingers, and a wedding ring on one of the fingers. She's not a housewife or anything like that, but she gripped the wheel when she saw Martha lolling across the street in pink and black, loitering in her low-cut top, her ankle-searing jeans, just asking for it. I thought, "What the hell. Stop judging my friends." My mother made a frown face that said "I’m double parked, but we'll talk later."

Fine.

I slammed the car door, loped across the street, loped up to Martha and noticed her nipples, tried not to notice her nipples. Everyone noticed Martha's tits, even girls. Even my dad, and it's not like he's a perv. Everybody looked.

I looked up, and away, at the movie listings.

"Lesbo!"-Eds.
"At least I'm graduating..."-Rose.

"We shall come to see the world with new eyes" --Emerson

2005-04-20T02:04:00.000-03:00

'To anyone who might read this: because of peculiar conflicts between "Word" and "Blogger," this following peice might have a strange hypertext incorporated into it. Don't worry, the Eds. will work it out. Promise.' -Eds

THINGS PARENTS TELL THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT NATURE

I. Banana Spiders

In the grove the banana spiders string up huge webs in all the free air space between the trees and across the dirt roads. Every now and then an orange blossom flutters down off a tree and gets stuck in one of the webs. The frustrated banana spider, sensing with his eight eyes that the blossom isn’t a delicious dragonfly, furiously shakes his web by madly flailing his eight armoured legs in every direction so the weight of his carapace so upsets the silk that the wayward blossom is eventually flung from the sticky web.

Blossoms aren’t the only accidental things that get caught in banana spiders’ webs. Bats and small finches are constantly entangled in the silky mess and to these creatures banana spiders are completely unforgiving. Packs of spiders, sometimes as many as five, bear down on the struggling bat or finch and bite into their prey to stop its desperate struggling with venom, after which they proceed to mummify and later devour their catch.

Those little balls of fur and feathers and bones that you always find underneath banana spider webs are actually just the leftovers of a handsome little bat or bird that the sated spiders have tossed out. You always thought they were owl pellets.

I reckon they’d just as soon eat a little boy as a butterfly, if only they could contrive a method to get him.

II. Cormorants

"Hey boy. If I were you I would stay away from the lacing on the trampoline. It’s not just water that comes up through those holes.”

“Huh? What do you mean dad? What else comes up through those holes?”

“I don’t want to tell you. You’ll get all scared and then you’ll make me take you home to your mother. Now hush up and pull out the main sheet. We’re tacking now.”

“All right dad. Tacking!”

“You see that thing up in the water over there? Sticking up out of the surface like a bent snorkel?”

“You mean that cormorant? Yeah, it’s just a bird.”

"That’s what they teach you in school, eh? That ‘bird’ is the reason you should stay away from the holes in the lacing. Not only are cormorants incredibly vicious and violent creatures, but they have razor sharp teeth on their orange beaks. I saw a cormorant take off a man’s arm once. The blood from the wound only brought more cormorants, rabid with bloodlust and it was absolute hell to get the poor man out of there!”

“I thought you weren’t going to tell me about that dad.”

“I wasn’t, until I got to thinking about what a cormorant could do to a little boy like you. It’s my job to protect you. So stay away from those holes.”

III. Man o’ War

Now listen. If you ever get stung by a man o’ war, the very first thing you must do is get out of the water and pee on the place that the tentacles got you. I know, I know, it sounds gross. But you got to do it. Even if you got stung on the face. If you can’t reach the place where you got stung with your own pee, get someone else to pee on you. That’s the only way to make sure the place you got stung doesn’t go numb for the rest of your life. Your grandpa Jim got stung on his foot and he could never feel anything in it ever again. Do you want that to happen to you?

IV. Alligators

I bet you didn’t know that an alligator can run 25 miles per hour, which I’ll tell you is a heap faster than you can. But there is a way to evade one if he’s chasing after you. Instead of running straight away from him, run in a more zig-zag fashion. Alligators can’t see so well to begin with and when they are forced into running left and right, they get too confused to pursue you very seriously.

But I’ll tell you, this is a serious issue. Why do you think dogs and raccoons are always getting snatched up by alligators? It’s because they’re too stupid to run zig-zag and they run straight instead.

And remember Rueben Lukins? Of course you do. Remember what happened to his foot? He was fresh off the train from Georgia and didn’t know the first thing about alligators, and when one started after him he just took off without even thinking about what everyone had told him. No doubt he’ll have that limp ‘til the day he dies.

V. Coral Snakes

Red and yellow, kill a fellow. Red and black, friend of Jack.

Or wait. Red and yellow, quite the fellow. Red and Black, swift attack.

I can’t remember. Either way just get the shovel and pop it’s head off. No matter what the bite’s going to hurt, corn snake or coral snake, and on top of that there’s at least half a chance it’s going to kill you dead. So kill it first.

VI. Manatees

Momma manatees love their babies just like I love you.

'Young children come to see the world with whatever eyes their parents give them. As a baby boy Blood grew to see the grove, the hammock, and the lagoon with the wary eyes of his mom and dad. Manatees love and cormorants kill - I dare any reader to try to doubt Blood's conviction in Nature.' -Eds.

'P.S. The rest of the trine is wasting their time trying to complete their degrees. Blood should be doing this too, but he has taken up a "Fuck That" attitude, and has decided to publish regardless of his impending "Ethics After the Holocaust" and "The Deconstruction of the Tradition" assignments. It's called punk, fuck.' -Eds.

DESTINATION ENCAENIA: Blood.

Plumb the Bob

2005-04-17T03:17:00.000-03:00

Bob:

Bob hailed from Jersey, where there was about one quarter as many Haitians:

“Y’know I feel like I gotta have my goddam passport just to go through the toll booth down here. I don’t know a fuckin syllable of French, much less that mumbo jumbo Creole shit they chatter on and on in. I fuckin hate it down here and I wish I never fuckin came. Its either fuckin hot or there’s these bat-sized mosquitoes eatin you up or there’s some fuckin French speakin nigger trying to cut you off on the turnpike in his truck with all his fuckin spade cousins clinging to the back. But you know I gotta make that dollar. I’ve been a plumber since 1968, except for when I took two years off to kill gooks. You know its pretty hot down here, but it aint nothing like on the LZ in Vietnam where your sweat evaporates instantly in the 120 degree heat. Yeah, I spent some time in Vietnam. I did a few tours, got wounded, got sent home with a Purple Heart. I married my wife about then. We had gone to high school together. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that a marriage is always one hundred percent happy, cause it ain’t. She made me quit my drinking, and she took away my smoking, so all I got left is my fuckin cursing. Fuck them if they cant take a joke!”

Whenever Bob runs the sewer machine down a clogged pipe, he tries to mentally escape from the stench of the faeces and decaying tampons by imagining himself cycling in the Irish countryside:

“Yeah, so that’s great that you’re gonna go over to England for a little while – the way I figure, is if your smart enough to read and write and understand simple shit and math and shit, you can rule the world. Yeah, I myself am a big war buff…my wife calls me a warlord. I would love to go over there and see all those old war grounds and shit. I’d fuckin love to go to Ireland and see where the Titanic left from. What I’d really like to do is go over to Ireland with my bike and ride around on all those old country roads, swooping through little towns and big green fields and hills and shit. Fuck! I cant stand it when the cable has those tampons on it. That blood is almost black – it makes me fuckin sick. But anyways, I fucking love wars and war memorabilia and all that shit. I do a lot of Civil War re-enactments. I’m in the Seventh Connecticut. Where are you from?…Get out of here!…No Shit!?…Noone is actually from here…Five generations? Fuck…no kidding? Y’know up North everyone thinks that this place down here is like a staging ground for old people on their way to death and the beyond…not like a place where people actually come from. Anyway, since your ancestors fought in the 1^st Florida, you should be in the 1^st too. I know some guys in that one, and even though they’re just a bunch of beer swilling redneck rebels, they’re ok.”

As Bob rambles on, his young assistant begins to feel very uneasy around the New Jersey plumber. The assistant finds himself nervously grasping for a heavy pipe wrench laying on the tiles next to his left foot in the client’s kitchen, and turning to face Bob, he lunges at the back of the disgusting Yankee fuck’s melon shaped head, swinging the wrench like a fish club. In the few remaining seconds of his fading consciousness, before the pinkish brains start to ooze out of the gaping fracture in the back of his skull, before the deluge of thick black blood forms oily rivulets in the grouting between the tiles, Bob has a revelation that diffuses his most recent idle chatter: Some people really do come from Florida…Florida is a place for Yankees to come and die…And indeed, he never should have moved here.

"Long time waiting...long time coming. In all those old cold places coated with dust and rats we find a little puff, a little dose of ages past, a little taste of those sacrosanct times when things where a bit duller, a little bit more holy, a little bit rougher. That saccharine taste makes us sick now and gives us the brown and crimson runs, but we dont burst out with anything but joy...a new post! Oh lord!"--Eds.

Examining: Blood

SCABS - "Lonliness"

2005-03-27T02:49:00.000-04:00

'As we all know, scabs are dried up blood. Long, long, long, dried up blood. Here I offer my own scabby entry into the Florida emo-violence scene of the early-to-mid 90s. This "Loneliness" has been a long time comin'. In the spirit of DINNER 1933 (Vero Beach) and PALATKA (Palatka) I submit this trash. Let the "Disenchanted" reign.' -Eds.

BUSTING A HAND:

I walked into the liquor store to buy some bourbon and beer. Passing through the door, I doffed an imaginary hat at the policeman who hangs about on Friday and Saturday nights in order to keep young kids from buying booze. He touched his hat back at me.

So I get what I need, and I’m passing through the checkout. The woman running the till looked at me and said “What are you all dressed up for?” I put on a solemn face, looked at the floor, and said “A wake. My friend suicided on Thursday.” She handed me my change, her face drained of colour, and said “sorry”.

I turned, walked out of the store, and laughed gently at the thought of drawing sympathy and concern from a stranger. No one died. At least no one I know.

So then I go home, feeling better about myself, ruminating over the power I can weld when I wear a suit – the power to suck sympathy out of strangers. Vampirism. Leaching emotion off of people I don’t even know.

Back home, I’m sitting on the floor in my suit, listening to punk rock albums – The Casualties, The Business, The Exploited, The Angelic Upstarts, GBH, The Buzzcocks, The 4-Skins, The Antiheros, The Templars, Aus-Rotten, Mankind, The Ramones, Bad Religion, The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, The Anti-Nowhere League, Ottawa, Drop Dead. The music gets harder and harder. I turn it up louder and louder. I’m getting drunker and drunker. My head is spinning and I take another hit of speed to steady it and to keep me awake. It makes my nose bleed, which is pretty weird seeing as how I freebased it.

I find my personal CD player, gather my bottle of bourbon and my tobacco, and head out through the back door with the intention of going down to the harbour to get fucked up and walk around, lonely.

I never get further than the corridor, the blank one with the green stairs and the brick wall. I’m sitting on the first landing of the steps, rolling cigarettes and listening to Saetia, this really loud screamo band from the early nineties. They’ve broken up. And I’m sitting there, trying to listen to the lyrics – and I have no fucking clue what they are, but I think I can decipher this one lyric that goes “this loneliness haunts my everything”. And so what with the whiskey and the drugs and the lyrics, I’m getting pretty much all around fucked up. I didn’t even have to go down to the harbour to find loneliness. It was right there in my building.

So then I go to another hallway, on the other side of the building, the one that leads to the garage and the basement. The stairs there are covered in big pink tiles. I’m sitting, spitting at the wall and looking at it ooze down like molasses, listening to it ultimately drip onto the dusty floor. Loneliness haunts my everything.

This bores me, so I venture down into the basement proper, looking for something to break. I find a computer monitor and instantly wish I had a baseball bat, making a mental note to see if I can find one at the Salvation Army.

I go back up to my apartment and get a set of gloves, for two reasons really. One is that my hands were freezing, and the other is that I didn’t want to leave any finger prints when I started to sit in people’s unlocked cars, rummaging through their shit. I didn’t steal much, but I did get an old Nirvana album. And then I went crazy, the speed really fucking kicking in now, and I ripped all the signs off the doors – Electrical Room, Furnace Room, Ground Floor, First Floor, Second Floor, Elevator, Recycling Only, Garbage Chute.

I debated going up to my room again and getting the lighter fluid, setting this big wooden crate on fire in the basement, and then pulling the fire alarm, thus waking up all of the assholes in the building at 3:00 in the morning. But then I thought about it, and I realized there would probably be an arson investigation, and then they would trace the lighter fluid back to me somehow, and then I’d have to go to jail and get raped by big niggers for the rest of my youth. That didn’t seem so good to me. So instead I put my hand through a window. It was thick glass, the kind that has the chicken wire inside of it to keep it together if it breaks. It fucking hurt too, and my hand started bleeding all over the place, the bone exposed and my meta-carpals cracked, tendons flopping out like loose pieces of string.

Instantly it sobered me up, and I got what I’d wanted all along. Company. The loneliness had broken when I started screaming and hollering, wiping blood on the walls as I staggered down the hallway. This was better than falsely soliciting sympathy from a liquor store clerk, better than pulling a fire alarm to create a gathering of people, and definitely better than being alone. These neighbours of mine rushed to my aide, wrapping my hand, mopping up the blood, calling 911. The doctors and nurses were all genuinely concerned, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel completely alone.

'This dumb faggot. He sits around and listens to "Orchid" while waiting for emo-violence. For him the trope has become serene and totally sacred. Say a bad thing about "Asshole Parade" or "The End of the Century Party" and he'll likely kick your teeth in. Young lad needs to grow up, eh?' -Eds.

'While all of that is true, we must keep in mind the old tome from Hot Water Music, those legends in our age: "You can take the boy out of Merritt Island, but you can't take the Merritt Island out of the boy."' -Eds.

Declination: Blood.

LOVE LETTER

2005-03-14T02:59:00.000-04:00

"Blood's gone a little crazy and has decided to go 'post haste.' He's published twice tonight, inserting original material back-to-back with the hopes of garnering our affections. Don't forget to read the post directly after this one for another 'bloody' entry." --Eds

Dear Lindsey “Flimsy” Brown:

I fucked up my pen when I wrote all over your face, so I had to buy another one in London. I had borrowed one from the night porter at the hotel in Brighton on Monday night when I was drunk so I could write a postcard to a friend. But it didn’t have a cap so I just left it in the hotel room.

I was sitting on the pebbles at Brighton, taking pictures of the dilapidated old West pier, drinking Kronenbourg, watching the sunset way out in the West, out past Hove and Portsmouth, down across the Atlantic right over to Hatteras Island where I imagined that the sun was still out and you were driving somewhere with your little brother in a Neon or whatever you said you drove and the car is silent, save the thrumming of the engine and the hum of wheels on road and you’re looking at the back of the car in front of you and something reminds you of someone who had kissed you and your eyes sparkle a bit and a trace of a smile flashes across your mouth and you raise your fingers to touch your lips. Your little brother watches you do this and wonders why girls are so weird.

Oh Lord! Oh Lord do I remember Hatteras Island. It’s so far North that it snows in the winter but it's so Southern that girls like you come from there. Shit. Buxton and Avon. Rodanthe and Hatteras proper. Drive further North to Nag’s Head. Sit on the sand and think about Blackbeard. Pamlico Sound and pirate ghost ships haunt all my dreams when I’m on the Outer Banks. I imagine things about you a lot. I imagine that it’s really dark out and the sky is black with clouds and the wind is blowing hard. You and I are sitting around a fire that we made on the beach. Around us are our respective friends – I have never met yours and you have never met mine and they have never met each other, but they chatter on relentlessly. We are sitting across from each other and the wind is blowing your hair across your face and you’re looking at me and I’m looking at you and the fire is flickering, no, smouldering now. Ghost crabs run into the fire because they are attracted to the light. Your cheek is a little dirty from some ash or something. Waves rumble down by the water and every now and then the clouds break and a silver moon shines through and the moon looks cold and it is cold.

Another image of you (this one is real): you’re unconscious and your nose is bleeding. Your head is cocked to one side and the blood drips onto the flint pavers and the air is so hot and still that you can hear the blood when it splashes against the rocks. That was in Kent. It was at Canterbury, and you passed out by the old museum on ‘this’ side of the river. Later we ate lunch at some café right near the cathedral and I had a beer and you told me I drank too much.

If I could get to Chapel Hill would you up and go with me to Louisiana? You said that you wanted to go to Italy because you thought that it would be romantic – but what about the Bayou Teche? We could hold hands on the mud flats and look at the pelicans swooping down into the Mississippi for mullet. We could sleep all day on an old four-poster in an antebellum house with a wrap around veranda. We could drink iced tea in rocking chairs and look out across the lawn at the foraging armadillos.

When we’ve got New Iberia, what use do we really have for Italy?

Yours,

PAUL S. BLOOD

"Long lost loves are great, yet they are doubly great when they remind us of our current ones. Obviously, Blood is reminiscing about some dude he met while he took a term at Cambridge and NOT some girl from Buxton, NC or Antigonish, NS. Even so, his newfound respect for life and love can only be attributable to the time of year and his prolificness as of late can only be due to love." --Eds.

SERIALISM: Radio

2005-03-14T01:55:00.000-04:00

FM 100.2. Radio Personality:

I fell in love with you during a radio program you never heard. The radio squawked and the AM band dared to interfere. I turned the squelch down low so I could intercept it all.

In ULF you came in clear, locally, like pirate radio.

In the wee hours of the night I died on ham radio; your voice was a heart attack.

FM 100.1. A Strip Mall:

There was a tang to the fluorescent lights that made me feel sterile. I impelled you to meet my voice at the Walgreen's near the bowling alley, and after much consternation, you acquiesced.

Your tube top was flimsy and no doubt easy to peel.

FM 100.0. An Amalgam:

In that hot hot heat we blended. Spanish moss draped across our loins and the chiggers bit down hard on my scrotum (yankees call 'em red bugs. Red bugs!).

Your moans echoed across the lagoon while we shared a moment of bliss in the crabgrass. I moaned too.

During our sudden climax the wind whirled around us; later, as we laid mesmerized, an old man walked along the shore of the lagoon and killed the horseshoe-crabs on the sand by jabbing them with his cane.

FM 99.9. A Strip Mall:

Back under the fluorescents you told me it wouldn't last. We kissed in front of the phone booth and vowed to never utter another word. You left first, and as I watched your rollicking hips drift into the salt-mist of the lagoon, I swore you were dead.

Maybe we died in that white-hot heat, the white-hot light of August when we mixed our pain. Maybe we died in the Light of August when me mixed our blood.

FM 99.8. Radio Personality:

I flipped the dial and Ira Glass gave way to Howard Stern. Love gave way to lust and I grieved for NPR - where tomes of love once quelled my aching heart, the endless passions of the flesh now conquered it, and I gave my heart away to the maelstrom of the mainstream.

EPILOGUE:

FM 90.7. NPR:

This American Life taught me how to love. Ira Glass, and his lispy voice, has taught me to be an American, just as much as Thomas Jefferson or Theodore Roosevelt. American realism is a rare and remarkable thing, and we find it in Ira Glass just as we found it in David Berman, Richard Rorty, and Walt Whitman. God Bless the US, indeed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

BLOOD (CLOT?)

"It's nice to have Blood back, however, as we all know the volatility of his character, he will return to menace us with something sick and gay again. Maybe it's the spring, maybe it's his fondness for an Antigonishian, and maybe it's the booze; regardless of all that, we know that we can only be safe when the chiggers bite him and he returns home for a while. Such drama - such weakness." --Eds

Drunk Girl at a Party

2005-03-02T21:22:00.000-04:00

I threw a party some time in February, but forgot to invite any guests. Some caught wind and came anyway. (He came, anyway. Digby, that is. Or else it was the other one—Brad.)

But all in all, it was a failed party. The timing was off: a boy at school had died earlier in the week. The bad news mingled with blue cigarette smoke and hung heavy in the room, making the ceiling feel low.

All of this depressed me, so I drank some whiskey from the bottle. Felt his eyes on me—Digby’s—thinking: “Now there’s a girl who drinks whiskey from the bottle.” Well. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t calculated. Or no, you can’t call a reflex calculated. It’s more subtle, more feminine than that. Once, when I was twelve, I walked into a restaurant with my father, and a man in a suit turned to look. Twelve! Some things you pick up, over time.

The whiskey undid me, and I went into a haze. Then I really was bashful, a drunk girl in a party dress, all of those things. When we found ourselves face to face, it was unclear who had cornered whom. What I should’ve said was: “Here I am!” But he sneezed so instead I said “You’re sick.”

That was it. In the morning, my hair smelled smoky.

~ROSE~

"Next time change all of the details and keep the first letter of his name. Then he'll wonder!"~Eds.

Some Things You Ought To Know

2005-03-01T21:25:00.000-04:00

“The heart is deceitful above all things.” – JT Leroy

They had regular positions, “off”-nights and “on”-nights, and other things. Really it was inscrutable from the outside. We watched when they bought a potted fern, watched it grow and watched it die, poisoned by tea-leaves and cigarette butts. Strange sounds emanated from the apartment. An erratic cycle of records that, you suspected, sometimes captured the mood. In the afternoon, in the morning, all night.

How would I know?

They created a Blog and wrote a secret language. It wasn’t what they said but how they said it. Commentary was solicited, only they wrote in using fake names. Another way to have a laugh at the vacancy, all the dumb luck, the blank shots everyday.

And it was written on their faces, the way they walked, and wore their clothes. Some bodies hang garments like a mannequin, the way they’re supposed to hang. Some people wear their skins and bones properly too, I gather.

But what do I know? I would rather slip unnoticed into the dark harbour sometimes and look at the stars. Float on my back until the sharks come get me.

I know some things.

The heart is arrogant above all things.

Stuart J. MINT

"Tear." - Eds.

Total Sex, or, Eye to Eye

2005-02-27T23:50:00.000-04:00

'The perception of nature is a sort of dance'
-Simone Weil, dead French Hegelian

'O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?'
-W.B. Yeats, dead Irish poet

'Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?'
-Stephen Morrissey, singer of The Smiths

---------------------------------------------

Dancing With Myself - A Play in One Act

Act One - Umsturtz der kopernikanischen Lehre: die Erde als Ur-Arche bewegt sich nicht

SCENE and SYNOPSIS: In some hovel in Golgotha two losers scribble out Ian Curtis wishlists. Once finished, each shoves the paper into his mouth and moans and grunts only before myopically running into the walls on unsteady morphine-soaked legs. Anosognosia has made one of each of their arms like a long cold snake, and just as Frankenstein or frogs' legs, electrodes that have been stabbed into the polar ends of their muscles cause them to twitch and spazz. Their goal is to dance, and through repressing their habitual bodies they interact, but the persistence of memory brings both to their final conclusion.

Me: "I saw you from across the kitchen. I was wondering if you wanted to dance."

Myself: "Ok. Can I put a record on?"

Me: "Sure. "

Myself leaves the kitchen and sits in front of the stereo in the living room and puts on 'Total Sex' by Whitehouse. The noise makes the walls start to melt. Me walks out of the kitchen and into the hallway, checking his part in the mirror on the wall before joining Myself in the living room. Myself turns to Me and sets a drink down on an old cork coaster. Me reaches into his pockets and takes out all his loose change (21 pennies), a picture of a fly-rod, some lint, and a slender pink orchid and arranges them on the table in the shape of a Rhinocerous. Myself picks himself up off the floor, removes his cuff-links, his suspenders, his gaiters, his wig, his wing-tips, and his bowtie and looks Me in the eye. Me looks at Myself. A staring match. The eye sees the eye. Something happens.

Myself (taking out a switchblade from an unseen crevice): "So you wanna dance, motherfucker? What the fuck are you looking at?"

Me: "Not much, bitch."

Myself lunges at Me, but Me dodges, sustaining only a tiny knick to his elbow. A scuffle ensues, and the knife is accidentally stabbed into the melting drywall, where it too begins to melt.

Me: "So you wanna play, fatboy? I never knew you were so fat and retarded."

Myself: "Get real, fucknut. I can't believe that you can survive the night without your lungs being crushed by your huge bulk."

Suddenly, a brace of pistols appears on the table next to Myself's drink. We both dash for them. Face to face, pistols pointed simultaneously at one another's temples, Me and Myself gaze upon each other one last time. The triggers are pulled, the bodies collapse, and a huge jet of black blood gushes up and out of our heads like a merry fountain, like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket. Splatters of suet and flakes of scab have speckled the cottony clouds and I gaze at them as I walk home in the sun thinking about the 'naturalicher Weltbegriff' and the 'lebenswelt'.

FIN

DESTINATION: BLOOD!

"Could you think of anything more perverse than a multiple-personality disordered person killing himself? You'd have to try to fuck your own mind or something. BTW, pretentious quotes are for assholes. Get real, fucknut." --Eds

TRUE STORY

2005-02-25T02:10:00.000-04:00

An Education in Emotional Literacy

You never want to be called dull so you hold your tongue. Keep secrets. One afternoon one summer I saw a drunk girl in bed. In my bed, and she was talking to me.

“I like you but you’re kind of dumb honey.”

I stared off at my baseball cleats for a while. It was a hot day, I remember. Outside people were celebrating the end of an international sport’s tournament: they were Greek. There was really a lot going on and it had been a full day.

It was getting dark and I think she woke up.

“What time is it?”
“Shhh, don’t talk now, not now.
"What?"

The next day I was resolved maybe to act differently around this person; but it was raining, I needed a haircut, and I wasn’t feeling good about myself. I got lost later in the afternoon walking around the alleyways. Bought a record. Found a tape I thought to present as a token. Lookey what I found.

But I don’t think she understood the Pixies are a good band. The offer was rescinded, or rejected outright. Later it cheered me listening to ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ leaving town, in August, and all of my things packed in the trunk.

* * *

“Is it really possible to be unhappy at 22?”

When? Yes?

“???”

Stuart J. MINT

'Keep up the pace, keep out the quality.' -Eds.

"And there I was, turning twenty-three, with all kinds of capacity, a college graduate, a European traveller and man of the world, and with no end of personal charm. But I didn't have a job; I didn't have any money; I didn't have a girl. What ought one to do in a melancholy situation like that? Something was demanded.

I decided to become a Bohemian."

- Harold Stearns, Confessions of a Harvard Man.

Filling Up the Day

2005-02-23T16:41:00.000-04:00

Last night’s resolution: "TOMMOROW"

That was it. I even wrote it down in the cheap, blue-lined journal that Hallie bought for me at the K-Mart in Lafayette. It’s the type of journal that says “Journal” on the front cover in a curly font that’s meant to look like women’s handwriting. I kind of like how ugly it is. I had this fancy, leather-bound affair when I was about fifteen and all I did was fill it up with all kinds of angsty crap about boys and friends. What a waste.

I really did write it down: "TOMMORROW", underlined three times in my ugly, disposable journal. I could show it to you, if you wanted to see. But the thing is, it ended up being a bad night. Fever dreams, etc. Woke up late this morning, started walking in the wrong direction. Had six cups of coffee in four different coffee-shops, and ended up here, in this red-curtained dressing room, mirrored and low-lit, fingering old silk.

This is a classy place. There’s a sign on the wall that says “Careful ladies! Old fabrics tear easily”, and you’d call this dress I’m holding a “garment”. They really do up the lighting. I put the dress on a minute ago and felt pretty, like a glamour-shot.

A woman on the outside is asking: "How’re you DOing in there?” She’s saying it in a way that’s pushy, not friendly. God, I hate that. But you can’t really blame her. She saw me bring my backpack in, probably thinks I’m stealing. It’s been twenty minutes or so—maybe twenty five—and there’s only so long you can hide out in a dressing room before the salespeople start getting creeped out.

~Kathryn ROSE~

"Geez. The stuff about sex and death had some shock-value, at least." -Eds.

Drunk Girl In Bed

2005-02-23T03:32:00.000-04:00

First Reaction: Nowhere to sleep

Second Reaction: Oh god. I better do something.

Third Reaction: Shit. She looks sweet when she's sorta drunk and angry all at once. How could I take a stern tone?

Fourth Reaction: I'm almost outta smokes. Did she just fart? No, I guess that was the chair.

Fifth Reaction: She didn't know it, but I mixed a Goody's aspirin powder in with that bottle of water I tried to make her drink. She may have puked, but that painkiller will numb her fucking hangover, and I'll bet you a dollar she wont thank me.

Sixth Reaction: After a long night of hooting bourbon and pounding old milwaukees, I'm not entirely sure if this girl wants to fuck or fight.

Seventh Reaction: I am a little tired. Better take a hoot of my own.

Eighth Reatction: We listened to Jimmy Buffett earlier and I thought about the south. Sometimes, when a woman murmurs the last two stanzas of "The Idea of Order at Key West" to you, your mind sorta falls to pieces. I had in my hands a little Wallace Stevens and she had in her hands a little Frank O'Hara. I 's'pose she won that round.

Ninth Reaction: I just told her she was pretty. I say that a lot. I don't really feel like she believes me. This afternoon Pete and I talked about the lack of humour on The Onion, and somehow the concept of "having one's boat waxed" came up. Pete was like "It's Great!" I couldn't think of a retort, so I gave in to the meanness of saying that I liked having "his mom waxed."

Tenth Reaction: I tried for a long time to do a crossword. I listened to 'An Albatross' and tried to think of four letter words ending in "-edd," with respect to the clue "62. Jerk."

'I never knew that Blood stood for wuss in street slang. Maybe we can all learn something from that. Super-Aids...is there any meaning here? Create it or destroy, lest I puke' --Eds.

BLOOD

Psycho Killer: Robert D SNAPS vs. Paul S BLOOD

2005-02-15T00:48:00.000-04:00

Gross Prelude:

Run a finger along your desk and find that sick dust.

Look at your finger. There's little bits of hair and ancient flakes of dead skin.

Lick your finger. You won't, 'cos yer a wuss.

Gross Story:

Let me tell you about a man I know. He's from Georgia. He lives near Atlanta, or at least that's what he tells me. He may or may not take care of his parents, his musical tastes might be obscure, and his sexual preference decidedly gravitates towards women.

In reality, he's a creepshow. Watch him and you'll see the bearded woman dance through his bedroom, the geek snap a neck off in his kitchen, and the quad bury his head in a bowl full of sand at the doorway.

What's creepiest about the grandmaster is his willingness to clip unsuspecting womens' hair.

He'll seduce a woman at his local bar. Humbert Humbert's I think it's called. He'll feed her some chardonnay, give her some smooth talk, and eventually pork her brains out. The best part is that he makes sure she comes. If she can't come, he'll fuck her 'til at least 5:30 am, whereupon he'll go to the kitchen and find a razor and some shears, return to find his partner asleep, and cut all her hair off.

Gross Addendum:

Let me tell you about me.

Once I was having sex with a sultry Jewess. Her breasts were large but her face was cute and her body was incredible.

I fucked her to sleep. As she dozed off, her pussy got much drier. It hurt me a little, and I got angry.

Her vagina felt like sandpaper. Like sharkskin. Obviously, I was incensed.

I punched her sleeping body in the face until I couldn't see her big Jewish nose anymore, and then afterwards I fucked her broken jaw. The bones and teeth hurt a little, but the blood was a good enough lubricant, and I felt like coming at least twice. I have to admit, even though it's pretty funny, that I put my penis in her sinus cavity: all of those layers of thin bone were painful and pleasurable at once. I felt like I was reading a Nabokov novel.

After a while I came in her face (her sinuses to be exact), and decided that even though she was a rich heiress, she was doomed to an unexplicable fate.

She was obviously still alive, and each time she reached for the telephone I either punched her in her carpals or alternatively blow-torched them. It was pretty wierd. Could you imagine a half-dead princess trying to get the phone? I mean, come on! She was half dead.

Eventually I ripped her clit off with pair of pliers, sewed her cunt closed with an old needle and some green thread, and cracked her skull open with an old rotary telephone.

The next day I awoke next to her rotting corpse and thought "How tactless! You reek!"

The End:

Smell your finger, cut your lovers' hair off, or affectionately pork a corpse. Which would you rather? Choose!

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Perhaps on instinct, perhaps from memory, she makes a futile dash for the front door, crying out. Though the chardonnay has dulled her reflexes, the Scotch I've drunk has sharpened mine, and effortlessly I'm leaping in front of her, blocking her escape, knocking her unconscious with four blows to the head from the nail gun. I drag her back into the living room, laying her across the floor over a white Voilacutro cotten sheet, and then I stretch her arms out, placing her hands flat on thick wooden boards, palms up, and nail three fingers on each hand, at random, to the wood by their tips. This causes her to regain consciousness and she starts screaming. After I've sprayed Mace into her eyes, mouth, into her nostrils, I place a camel hair coat from Ralph Lauren over her head, which drowns out the screams, sort of. I keep shooting nails into her hands until they're both covered--nails bunched together, twisted over each other in places, making it impossible for her to try and sit up. I have to remove her shoes, which slightly disappoints me, but she's kicking at the floor violently, leaving black scuff marks on the stained white oak. During this period I keep shouting 'You bitch' at her and then my voice drops to a raspy whisper and into her ear I drool the line 'You fucking cunt.'" Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho - 245.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Call me crazy, but the idea of porking corpses is only half-gay. Is everyone retarded? Edit this shit OUT." --Eds

Paul S. Blood.

I am Such a Huge Poser

2005-02-14T00:56:00.000-04:00

I dare you to look in the mirror and tell yourself you're truly happy. Chances are you're more likely to holler "YOU"RE SUCH A FUCKING LOSER," turn around, and try again. In this sense each of us are one of many little hairs on a fat man's belly, jiggling with the laughter and shuddering with the sobs.

Have you ever waited until 1:01 am to light a cigarette, only to watch it burn in the ashtray? There's tobacco on your lips and smoke in your eyes, but the nicotine stays in its place, in that little ceramic bowl on the desk while you stare blankly at the wall.

The racing heart can't pump enough blood to keep that gross hemorrhage under control and then after too much blood little scabs coagulate in your nose and then it's hard to breath, the heart beats the heart beats the heart beats the heart beats and the lungs just...just...collapse. Is this panic? Your bodiless head is tossed into a basket and your headless body just sits there and stares at the wall, eyeless.

Was it Brad Pitt who said it? That we have no famine, no great war to fight, no great depression--that the only depression is our own? That we're all trained into thinking that we'll grow up to be movie stars and famous critics and brilliant drunken writers, but we wont, and we're very very pissed off?

Isn't it true? Nothing feels good.

Paul S. Blood

"Let's find our salvation in porno and strong drink. Let's mutually detest the presence of the other--those dead ghosts and sad apparitions looming behind us while we try to read our books and eat our tuna fish sandwiches. Isn't there supposed to be something more, some kind of humanity? No, and it's better that way." --Eds.

"And fuck that. I hated that post and it's 1,000 times better that noone will ever see it again. Sad sappy suckers have no space on this blog, and anyone who argues otherwise should face the knife, preferrably one attached to a guillotine." --Eds

Absent Minded

2005-02-12T16:52:00.000-04:00

Wrong! Home is in the brain, not the womb. Consider: decapitation vs. hysterectomy. Or recall our old conversation, the one about humanity and the guillotine. About whether a person is a still a person if their neck is spurting fluid and their head is lying in a basket on the other side of the blade. And is it a headless body at this point, or a bodiless head?

You were always a stickler for details—appealing to spasms, twitching digits, the clenching and unclenching of fists and jaws. Evidence of firing neurons, you said. And isn’t there something in that? Isn’t that a kind of life? Well, my answer is still no. A fervent no, no, no!

It was a gruesome conversation, but we had it anyway, countering blood and gore with tea and lemon squares. (Treats, I called them, and you objected).

Things were getting gruesome between us, too. Exchanges were stilted, or else they tended to escalate. There were pinched nerves--pulled, but not severed—and all I really wanted was a clean break!! To have been spared those last agonizing months! Those dagger-eyes from across the room, that last struggle on the kitchen floor, teeth on neck-flesh, my hair coming down, getting caught in your mouth. And, later, the ever-unmentionable episode--exhausting even to think about. The indignity of a body, nude in the stairwell, clutching at underthings, sobbing, haemorrhaging practically...

While on the other side of the doorway:

"!"

That’s not what I would call a debate.

K. ROSE

Post Mortem

2005-02-11T03:23:00.000-04:00

***Autopsy, not biography.***

First object: great and complex tangle of beddings, pervasive tang of livestock and bourbon. Sensual warmth from the body still, and I’m not first to arrive on the scene. Past lovers have come to clip his grown-out toenails and poke at the bedsores. He kept his peace in the end, I’m sure, despite the haunted and hypochondriatic report of inner demons and vultures come to pick out his eyeballs. That ‘s a tall tale my boy, don’t forget it, and you look mighty large from behind. An accumulation of pounds of flesh. From here you look an awful corpulent bugger.

But the romance of entropy and leprous decay, and of starring out at the South China Sea: I understand. You’re a ghost of a ghost of a ghost of yourself.

Well I stayed well into the night attempting to fashion the case. Called the Scarlet Rose for advice. She said, “It’s the room, it’s the ROOM,” and unplugged the phone. Went in a metaphysical direction: you see we came from a place, and we came to a place, but then we come to another place. To other places. I had mixed up the corpse with my own, three times moreover.

Couldn’t figure out what to do just then. Pulled out my pocketknife, and then later, stuck a hand down my pants. None of this felt right. Walked around in the nude, pondered new hobbies. Howling at the moon. Showered, adjusted the lighting, and listened to records in the living room. Fell asleep, with my cheek against the floor, at precisely 3:23 am.

Stuart J. MINT

PERSONALITY CRISIS, you got it when it was hot! – New York Dolls.

Abominable. Let us start a new thread, let us turn a leaf. – Eds.

Blood ought to repost his report of self-immolation, in the interest of the narrative thread. This is a response piece. – Eds.

Where There's Filth, There's Necessity

2005-01-30T20:09:00.000-04:00

Another proverb, another loser portrait. Also, more loser sex. Brace yourself! -Eds.

There was a man, let’s call him Digby.

Digby lived in a wrecked room in a large building full of other rooms that were not as wrecked as his. It was the type of bedroom that, if a mother were to walk into it, she would say:

“A tornado must’ve come through here!”

Except that there had been no tornado, or if there had been, it had come through so long ago that nobody could remember its passing. There hadn't been a mother, either. No, this room had always been wrecked, and Digby had simply moved in, installed himself here in the same way a roach or a mouse installs himself. Out of necessity, that is.

There was a bare bulb, and the bed was also bare. No sheets—only the silky pink floral of the mattress where it peeked out from under piles of laundry, books and shoes. The shoes embarrassed Digby when he thought about them very hard, which wasn’t very often. Once in a while, though, when the sun would slant in through his dingy blue curtains at just the right angle, he would think to himself:

"People do not keep shoes in there beds. There is SOMETHING WRONG with this."

He’d stare at a rubber sole, crusty with salt and sand, and it would strike him as a symptom of something hidden and profound. Something serious and requiring attention, maybe. There would be a moment of panic, and he’d get that feeling you get when you discover one of your own toenails in the bathtub. Or when you finally notice some twitch or disgusting habit that’s been perfectly obvious to everybody else and not at all apparent to yourself. Recognition! And terror. Then it would pass. The shoe would be a shoe again, and the room a simple dwelling.

(The bare, sandy mattress was also a source of embarrassment--even of shame--for a woman named Linda who occasionally found herself layed down upon it, her ample bottom sliding indecently on its polyester surface. Oh Digby! she’d think silently, while reaching for whatever angular object happened to be digging into her back. The papercuts stung, but she never mentioned them. She never mentioned his pants, either. Were they made of burlap? They gave her a rash. Oh Digby! )

If, when he died, you had opened up Digby’s head, you would’ve found an exact replica of his bedroom, in miniature, nestled inside his skull. Linda always suspected that this would be the case, but she was never able to confirm it. If she had, though, she would have said:

"See? It was the ROOM that was wrecked. The ROOM!"

Oh, the room. Of course. Well done, Linda.

But, anyway, it's too late now. Digby's been buried at sea.

-Kathryn Rose.

O Rose, Thou Art Sick!

2005-01-25T19:08:00.000-04:00

"When we get sick we see our psychologists and they make us feel better. Eulogy or get well card? Read on!" --Eds

***

Before she fell down and spilled her drink she was telling us about the time her sister came to visit and how she never knew that there was a baby coming and "oh, she didn't even show." Later on in the kitchen, once everything was dried off, the wounds bandaged, the bruises seen to, she told us about a mansion in the city with a huge tree that everyone was scared to cut down. Somewhere in the back forty a beloved mother was laid to rest by an exhausted father and a film crew took long shots down hallways and up staircases. There was a wedding in the garden, an exchange student on the second floor, and an attic office filled with exotic spirits and fine wines. Out on the curvy driveway rested two imports, fine black machines with heated leather seats and alloy rims and things like that.

"Daddy's just opened an office on Park Avenue. This combined with the Toronto offices will make him the richest man in all of Canada."

(Once Daddy watched a pretty red Lotus sink into a swamp in Michigan. There was really nothing he could do about it, so down she went.)

Despite the fact that we had mopped it up, the rye still settled in and made the carpet stink and it settled in her bones too until she was more than a little drunk. She told us about a happy-warm cottage on the French River and the little launch one took to get there. Grandpa was a travelling jewel salesman and eventually got the land before the Crown took up its surrounding environs. Now his babies and theirs could go rest in the woods for a little while and be together.

"Daddy's gone to Costa Rica (--cawsta rica--) for Christmas. I wont see him 'til the New Year, and then there's Graham and Elly and Ally and Bri and Gav and Dan and who knows who else I'll have to see and I'm just dreading going home. Just dreading it!"

(It's true, Daddy did go to Cawsta Rica, and Daddy did leave her alone on Christmas and Daddy did only visit her at his own will in Haltown. Oh Daddy! Why?)

Her stories were true and that is why we loved her. Her Daddy really was a jerk sometimes and she really cared. She knew these boys intimately--Graham and Elly and Ally and Bri and Gav and Dan--but she wasn't promiscuous and she always cared. She was born in a mansion and never knew anything else, but she was still ours, still the sweet girl who let us taint her pretty lace curtains with our grubby fingers and our vile tongues. She couldn't help but be herself and never wasted a synapse in contemplation of being anything else. She falls down, lives in a mansion, and comes from the best of the best, and if you didn't already know that about her, you probably still could have guessed. She was ours because she was pure (like a rose!), and we loved that about her.

***

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

"Isn't cutting to the bone another form of eulogy? Slice down deep and suck out the gross marrow that's always been kept secret. Who's next?" --Eds

Paul S. BLOOD

Bleeding Ear, Bleeding Heart

2005-01-22T17:21:00.000-04:00

~ creative meditation on mourning and tinnitus ~

I can talk about it calmly now all having been said and done so to speak. It’s alright for me to say that he is big and broadshouldered with hair on the body. Was large and odorous I should say. He radiated olfactory charm. I have never known the luxury of being forgiven my smells.

O and he impressed himself on the surroundings. The staggering variety of his possessions, its secret coherence, and the corpulent significance of his estate when we had dismantled the apartment. I hear his mother has preserved the childhood bedroom in Takkalachy County. I hear that old lovers come still to clip the locks and steal into the dark wooden ambiance and slip between the sheets. He has had even before now a haunting presence.

He spoke eloquently of his experiences. A sequence of romantic upheavals, running on empty, pushing the envelope. At least one red ticker-tape parade at his initiative, a wake of overwhelming emotion, and Bloodliness. Once we lamented our loss but he was deep down fishing for neon fish.

I thought he was drowned but the real end is less definite. I was the one to identify the body that was a brittle tangle of mortified limbs. His belly pregnant with seawater and an obedient school of fish. But anyone with an ear can hear the ring of his influence. Like a telephone? no: unanswerable and that turns the rest of us into plaster molds of what’s left of us.

Stuart J. MINT

One Eulogy, Two Eulogy More! The only death-wish here is aesthetical. - Eds.

In America, There are Eagle Scouts

2005-01-20T13:08:00.002-04:00

"How do you like your blueeyed boy, Mr. Death?"

Our boy was beautiful a boy, but he was sad and out-dated, like a letter. You wondered at him, wondered what he was doing here amongst all these vacuous young men—the Jeffs and Robs of the world, with their bland features and their insides like TV-static. Our boy was different. He was a New World boy. A real protagonist, or so he thought, and this was good enough.

Young hero of his own life, our boy covered ground! He took steps! He could light a fire with a single match! Argue with that one—I dare you! I dare you not to love him. Argue for paralysis, for the sound of time wasting, for a New New World… Our boy defied all that. He was from a place, and he left that place, like a hero should: with his father’s knife on his belt.

One thing was missing: a war. It’s tricky being a hero if you can’t go to war. Our boy went to University instead, and cut holes in his arms, and hung bloody rags on the wall.

~ROSE~

Just for you, Snaps: This last one is a either a eulogy, or thinly-veiled description of BLOOD. Probably, it's both. The editors feel that ROSE should "get over it" and quit fantasizing about the afterlife. -Eds.

When, Instead, It's An Anti-Climax

2005-01-10T18:28:00.000-04:00

What happened?

An appropriate question to ask when you're hovering in mid-air. There’s a split-second pause, awkward and stupid, and suddenly you’re a white elephant, a fish, a flounder. Or no—that great flightless bird—you remember it? Not the cartoon ostrich, but the purplish turkey-looking one who ran right off the edge of that cliff. KERPLUNK! What a gas. A bit overzealous, though, don’t you think? A bit eager? All of that drama--you'll get pimples.

*****

You’ve been at it again, haven’t you? Re-reading old emails from older flames? A dangerous past-time, my dear. But if you must...

*****

There’ll be dust: a minor, unremarkable mushroom cloud. And a halo of stars, of course. For punctuation purposes. You know. Oh, but don’t give us that look. And don't gawk--it's unbecoming. Really, you’ll be on your feet again in a minute. You’re resilient! That’s what we love about you! That's what we pay for! Now put on this funny hat.

*****

The girl’s got zeal, we always said. And all of that beautiful plumage.

Kathryn ROSE

Get it together, darling. Be a star not a sideshow. There's a girl. -Eds.

Now that I reread this a second time, I realize that what it's REALLY about is the exhaustion of philosophical discourse. Read IN to it for chrissakes, would you? With Love, ROSE

NEW YEAR, New Fear

2005-01-10T14:37:00.000-04:00

Breaking News: FUCK! Earthquakes and Tsunamis Fuck up Thailand and India and Shit. Sundry Hearts Devastated. Damage Not Limited to Southeast Asia - Aftershocks Felt Along Eastern Seaboard of North America from South Florida to Nova Scotia. Pipes Burst on Morris Street (Halifax). Hearts Shatter in Belle Glade. No One is Safe. Get Worried. Winter is Coming and Your Children are Still Outside. Pickle Beets and Store Them In Your Root Cellar. Stock Up on Bottled Water and Batteries. Genitals Will Bleed of Their Own Accord. The Damned Will Drown In Fiery Lakes of Their Own Bile and Pus. THE NEW YEAR IS UPON US!!!

* * *

The new year found him drunk at a bar with a fat girl clinging to him and he said to himself:

"I can't keep getting drunk like this."

* * *

And through the smoke he glanced at the television and saw live tsunami action and he said to himself:

"In twenty-two years I drunk 50,000 beers but they just wash against me like the sea into a pier."

* * *

And then he pushed the fat girl away (he didn't know her name, but guessed Jen and was right) and said to her:

"Get the fuck away from me."

* * *

And then he walked out of the bar and down to the beach, the deluge still fresh in his mind, and he meant to embrace the flood. This wash was a part of him. No longer impervious. Imbued! No more trying to swim...no more keeping the head above the surface...to sink! to submerge! to give in! what delight! what rapture! the rapture of the deep!

On the beach he meandered through the beached whales' ribs and skeleton keels and beams of the wrecks of old hulks. Offshore the sea thundered and everywhere on the beachy heads there was standing water. Under a wintry haze the moonlight shone down through the dark and illuminated the phosphorescence puddling at the old wooden joints and around the torn peices of blubber on the sand.

And in this milieu, under the hazy moon, trapped in the cage of a dead whale's ribs, staring at the churning sea and the sparkling sand, his little heart melted into a puddle in his chest and he said:

" ! "

* * *

'I was swimmin' in the Caribbean
Animals were hidin' behind the rocks
'Cept a little fish
But he told me, he swears
Tryin' to talk to me koi koi' - The Pixies

BLOOD loves WETNESS. His sister calls his boat the Relentless Hydration, sister ship to Perpetual Moisture. Is that a damp spot? Can I smell your sheets? -- Eds

Paul S. BLOOD, back from vacation in the beautiful south

ELEPHANT-MAN PENS APOLOGY LETTER?

2004-12-11T23:49:00.002-04:00

It was long and warm. That summer I had a sprawling apartment with big open windows. We let dust accumulate in the corners and cultivated dirty feet. Nobody would miss a thing, we said. I never got around to decorating.

It sprawled into cooler months and the wind picked up. We were forced indoors. We weathered it eagerly and with abandon. Unsightly growths and debris – the shadows elongated with the night. Pretty soon we woke in the dark and you looked like the downstairs neighbour.

Her name was Ivy and I thought she was missing the point. Most of our encounters were transacted in silence and I disappeared in the daytime. She hoarded things. There were unprovoked noises, there were hidden things in filthy cupboards.

I was within my rights, you know. The winter was dragging along and it was MY APARTMENT after all. And now you can follow the filthy footpath from my door to yours.

- Stuart S. MINT

Appalling melodrama – the horror the horror. A little coal-treat in the toes of this year’s Christmas stocking. – Eds.

SCIENCE [It'll Break My Heart]

2004-12-07T01:36:00.000-04:00

SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT:

Title: “‘Less than 40% Peanuts’—Fact or Fiction in Emerald of California’s ‘Mixed Nuts.’”

Abstract: For such a reputable company as Emerald of California (whose nuts have been utilized by my mother for years in such delicious recipes as “Chocolate Chip Cookies,” “Yummy Sweet Potatoes,” and “Ice Cream Sundae Toppings”), it doesn’t seem to be too bold an assertion that one of their most popular products, “Mixed Nuts,” includes under 40% of one of the world’s most often consumed (and often most reviled) nuts, the peanut. Implicit to this declaration is the claim that over 60% of Emerald of California’s “Mixed Nuts” are a random composition of Cashews, Almonds, Walnuts, Pecans, Brazil Nuts (in some regions also known as “Nigger Toes”), and Hazelnuts. This project intends to discover the truth behind Emerald’s “Mixed Nuts”—Are we really eating the guaranteed under 40% peanuts when we consume Emerald’s mix?

Hypothesis: I predict that after a random sampling of Emerald’s “Mixed Nuts,” it will become clear that there are over 40% peanuts present. I have personally consumed “Mixed Nuts” and believe that there is in no way any truth to the previously asserted “Less than 40% peanuts.”

Procedure: For this project I intend to acquire a single unopened canister of Emerald of California’s “Mixed Nuts: Less Than 40% Peanuts,” shake it up, and pour out four random samples (of any count) of nuts. I will count the number of peanuts, other nuts, and total nuts, present them in a ratio, and present the percentage of peanuts to other nuts with respect to total nuts. There will be no ‘control’ experiment because the problem is mathematically oriented—unlike typical Science Fair Projects that require some sort of standard (e.g.: biological experiments often utilize controls, which might, for example, take into account the normal life-span of a goldfish by giving him a clean and clear habitat with plenty of food and oxygen. This is the control. Whilst attempting to ascertain the amount of dissolved oxygen required to maintain life in other strained aquatic goldfish realms, we might find a young goldfish in a tank with an aquatic plant, or with obfuscated water, or with very little water. The happy goldfish tells us how long normal goldfish are supposed to live for, while the life-span of other goldfish in more high-risk environments tells us of the intricate conditions required to sustain goldfish life) this project makes no use of a control on account of its mathematicity. After all four rolls are taken I intend to calculate their mean and present this as the accurate percentage of ‘other nuts’ to ‘peanuts,’ and thus discern my conclusion.

Results (note: there are 308 grams of nuts, each of different mass—to count the absolute total number of nuts would be dumb for obvious highly-scientific reasons):

Shake ‘n Toss #1:

Total Peanuts: 20

Total Other Nuts: 11

Total Nuts: 31

11 / 20 = ? / 100, 11 x 100 / 20 = 55

Therefore, 55 percent of the nuts were not peanuts. This leaves 45 percent of the nuts as peanuts, which refutes the “Less than 40% peanuts” argument.

Shake ‘n Toss #2:

Total Peanuts: 50

Total Other Nuts: 12

Total Nuts: 62

12 / 50 = ? / 100, 12 x 100 / 50 = 24

Therefore, 24 percent of the nuts were not peanuts. This leaves 76 percent of the nuts as peanuts, which refutes the “Less than 40% peanuts” argument.

Shake ‘n Toss #3:

Total Peanuts: 27

Total Other Nuts: 5

Total Nuts: 32

5 / 27 = ? / 100, 5 x 100 / 27 = 18.51%

Therefore, 18.51 percent of the nuts were not peanuts. This leaves 81.49 percent of the nuts as peanuts, which refutes the “Less than 40% peanuts” argument.

Shake ‘n Toss #4:

Total Peanuts: 54

Total Other Nuts: 6

Total Nuts: 60

6 / 54 = ? / 100, 6 x 100 / 54 = 11.11%

Therefore, 11.11 percent of the nuts were not peanuts. This leaves 88.89 percent of the nuts as peanuts, which refutes the “Less than 40% peanuts” argument.

Calculation of the Average Amount of Peanuts:

Total Number of Nuts Counted:

#1: 60, #2: 32, #3: 62, #4: 31

60 + 32 + 62 + 31 = 185

Peanut Averages:

#1: 45%, #2: 76%, #3: 81.49, #4: 88.89

45 + 76 + 81.49 + 88.89 = 291.38

Total Nuts versus Peanut Averages:

185 / 291.38 = ? / 100, 185 x 100 / 291.38 = 63.49%

Therefore, an average of 63.49% of the nuts counted were Peanuts, leaving a mere 36.51% of other nuts.

Conclusion: This experiment has served to prove that on average there are far more than 40% peanuts in a canister of Emerald of California’s “Mixed Nuts.” The final results show a bold 63.49% peanuts to 36.51% other nuts, which proves the declaration of “Less than 40% peanuts” a bold lie.

'For twenty years or so, my friends and I have been studying these strange situations that the intellectual culture in which we live does not know how to categorize."--Bruno Latour

'Science tells us things. It tells us things like "drinking is sweet" and "I'd rather be two niggers in a Mississippi jail than be a philosopher of science." Man, science is cool. Remember all those dildos like Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos? I don't. All I remember is Michael Polanyi and Paul Feyerabend. Gay.' --Eds

Your Scientographer,
Paul S. Blood

the elephant man has a girlfriend

2004-12-03T20:40:00.000-04:00

There were certain objective measures that, when applied, offered good prognostication: he was getting laid more often than in High School. Those were bell-weather data, and oh what a night if you didn’t mind the chill. There was something indescribable about the winter. The regular crispness and reflective surfaces to be sure and something else he couldn’t finger down. And wouldn’t – he didn’t want to after all. A sense of energy, a certain clarity and sense of style in all matters, and he was sleeping well when he rolled over…

No: he wouldn’t break that off for anything. And cast a pall over the evening. Because he was responsible for 2 now, in any case not only for himself, at least he thought so. Not like he was used to be. And the possibility of exposure, of gestures that betrayed him, and intuitive understanding, struck him with full sense of horror. This was to be avoided at all costs (this was the important thing) since his stomach had grown soft with warm feelings. So yes, that was absolutely to be avoided. The evening would go passably well and Good Night!

He really didn’t care that there were more handsome couples or that moonlight refracted onto a variety of backs made everybody look like whalebones.

- Stuart MINT

Let's tally the score: as if a series of loser-portraits would undo centuries upon centuries of pictures of generals and dukes! It's time to start thinking about yr. career. - Eds.

An Ode: To Ramon Fernandez

2004-11-28T04:17:00.000-04:00

1. The Immortality of Blood

A long night and a large bottle of whiskey:

Is that really all it should take to feel like a King?

Bertie died easy; after so many nights of such indulgence he kicked the bucket, gave in to his decadence, and left a woman who wouldn’t die for 50 years.

Not me. No sir. This is the New World. This is the Land where we live off the Land. This is where no man leaves without significant blood. Blood in, blood out. Blood paved these streets. Sure, now you see cobbles. But imagine two hundred years ago. Imagine a hundred. Imagine fifty. Fuck it—look at these cobbles today. There’s no grout. Just more blood. It seeps through the seams like so many opened veins.

I am a new man in the New World. I came in with blood spewing, and lord knows that’s how I’m leaving.

No amount of whiskey will make me spill. No amount of smoke will make me choke.

2. The Phenomenology of Blood

Every man bleeds red. But not every man bleeds.

My blood pours forth and when I see it I see myself.

Through the haze I see a young man clinging to a tree, a tall tree, a tree so tall that his inevitable fall ensures his expiration. He clings to his tree and as the bark crumbles his fingernails crack and split and bleed forth.

From his fingers his blood drips down and splats on the sand so many feet below. When the blood hits the sand it sucks up the little sand granules and dries up. The blood coagulates around the granules and forms hard little brownish-red pellets. The blood drips and forms puddles and little coagulate stones form. Drip after drip upon drip and the stones form rocks, and rocks form boulders. The young man clings to the tree and bleeds and around him he builds a mountain of blood and sand.

Soon his blood and the sand have come up so high that he stops clinging, stops bleeding, stops scrambling against the crumbling bark with broken fingernails—he lets go of the bark and sets foot on the blood mountain and strolls down the grade and the hot sand at the bottom, at the foot of the blood-sand mountain, the hot sand burns his soles and feels good, it feels real, it feels real good and real hot and real clean and real pure.

3. The Heritage of Blood

At the peak of a long rolling hill I looked down and saw a valley.

In the valley there ran a river.

The river was red (with blood).

4. Does Blood Rule the Mind, or Does the Mind rule Blood?

The heart beats, but the heart murmurs. How can the heart murmur?

Blood squeezes through ventricles, but the ventricles hiccough.

Why do the ventricles hiccough?

5. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bloodstain:

Among twenty stinking pilons

The only thing moving

Was the pulsing vein

II.

I was of three minds

Like a vein

In which there are three slices.

III.

The blood swirled in the gay whirlpool.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV.

A Vein and its Blood

Are one.

A Vein and its Blood and a slice

Are one.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of infections

Or the beauty of hemophilia

The open wound gushing

Or just after.

VI.

Scabs had filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The bruise of the injection

Crossed it, to and fro.

The blood

Traced in shadow

An indecipherable pain.

VII.

O thin men of Sodom,

Why imagine blood-red birds?

Don’t you see how the heart-attack

Walks around the ankles

Of the cadavers near you?

VIII.

I know noble accents

And of pellucid arrhythmia,

But I know, too,

That the blood-goad is involved

In what I know.

IX.

When the bloodscab had gone

It marked the edge

Of one of many old-scars.

At the sight of blood-wings

Flying in a red light,

Even the bards from Crimson

Would cry out sadly.

XI.

He glistened over Ocala

In a crass coach.

Once, a spear pierced him,

And thus he mistook

The shadows of his entourage

For vampires.

XII.

The vein is throbbing.

The artery must be flooding.

XIII.

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The bloodclot sat

In the pit of my aorta.

5. The Horror of Blood

At the peak of a long rolling hill I looked down and saw a river that ran red with blood. In this blood I saw life…no…I saw doom. I saw the long narrow streets of an ancient piratical St. Augustine where anonymous blood grouted the smooth cold cobbles. It spilt forth and with a happy heart I watched it spill, I willingly watched it gush…with…with…with…idealism…until I began to weaken, until I realized that the Old Lie had betrayed me, that my heritage itself was the vampire, that the green green grass of home was dead and brown and that Pro Patria Mori could never make the green green grass alive again and that only my death, only my death, only my death, only my death outside of the Old Lie, only my fate at the hands of the too-tall tree, only my demise at the will of a swirling mass of bubbly red rapids, of the crimson hydraulic, only this, only these things, only this thing remained, only the Pale Horse could lend meaning to Dulce et Decorum Est—and these things haunted me until I cast off the mask and sucked in the poisoned air, the thick green light, and I floundered and convulsed to death in the muddy trench.

"Oh! Blessed rage for order, Pale Horse,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
words of the fragrant protals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."
-Wallace Stevens, 1936

"Oh fuck. Blood's gone on and wrote about himself for fucking ever!" -eds.

Con todo mi corazon,
BLOOD

Complicated Logic

2004-11-16T14:02:00.000-04:00

****

Jonah was big, and he was small—but mostly he was small.

His ribs were dainty, like a bird’s, and his nose stood out, beak-like, from the gauntness of his face. He seemed shorter than he was, and worst of all, he was afflicted with a small man’s small sense of pride. It was an I-love-you-Dad!-Fuck-you-Dad!-kind-of-pride, all angsty and adolescent, and it made him difficult to be around sometimes.

But his colour was good and strong, which endeared him to men and women alike, and over the years Jonah learned to keep his smallness at bay. He befriended women and other fine-boned men, which helped. He moved into a shitty apartment in a good part of downtown. He fucked around, tried being fabulous. He tried on homosexuality, and found that it didn’t fit, and this was OK. He stopped calling home on the weekends, and this was OK too. When I met him, he was twenty-six, and seemed to be feeling pretty OK about most things. OK so long as certain touchy subjects were carefully avoided. Certain touchy subject and full-length mirrors—he had learned to steer clear of them both.

One thing you could say about Jonah, though: he had blood in his cheeks and eyes to die for. “Eyes to sink a ship in," someone told him, once. It had been an older woman—a woman with cleavage and pantyhose, a woman with a real job, who at the time, had seemed impressive and experienced to young Jonah. He never did let go of that comment--passed in on to me years later, in fact. It was true. A person could've drowned in those eyes.

"Maybe there's a simpler place--a place that has nothing to do with downtown--where things operate according to a certain simple logic. Where bigger really does mean better, where self-love is nothing psychological, where bulk counts, and bones that are too small get broken."-Eds

-Kathryn ROSE.

Sons and Lovers

2004-11-11T20:44:00.000-04:00

SONS

1. As a stowaway from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy out on the Bering Sea and subsequently the Sea of Okhotsk Nikolay N. Muravyov survived on bilge rats, stale hardtack, and bad water until the cargo holds were finally flung open in Vladivostok. Once safely ashore in Siberia he volunteered for military service, was deemed unfit, turned to the merchant navy, and was a part of the Vladivostok Cruiser Group responsible for suppressing the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904.

2. Growing up near the stick marsh at Fellsmere Kelly Runnels always had an affinity for muck – even the earthy smell of the ugly yet nutrient rich filth caused him to swoon. He was so entranced by its potential for making him a wealthy man that he spearheaded the infamous Fellsmere-Kenansville Causeway project, the old Highway 170, the ambitious prospect that eventually martyred Holland as it sank into the voracious stick marsh, the creamy white marl mixing with the rich black muck, the same muck that cemented the ancient taproots of the Runnels family in Indian River County.

3. John Albury was determined to make it for his future family, so when the empire offered land for settlement in the Caribbean, he jumped at it. It was a gamble, sure, but wasn’t everyday life a gamble in nasty old Portsmouth? When he finally built the tiny little shack on the windward side of Great Abaco the true scope of his future was unknown to him, but to those around him the glimmer in his bright green eyes anchored him in a destiny filled with prosperity. It was here, at the Windward House at Hopetown, Great Abaco, that Albury built a family empire of his own, where he and his wife ensured a happy future for their babies and the hundreds of Alburys to come.

LOVERS

1. An exhausted Vera Kommissarzhevskaya was just finishing up the 9,302 kilometre trip from Moscow when she uttered to her co-star in the smoky railcar “Is there even a theatre in Eastern Siberia?” The famous actress was to give a special guest performance at the brand new (yet entirely unknown by Muscovite standards) Pushkin Theatre in Vladivostok. Little did she know that the nautical riff-raff from the Matrosskaya Sloboda [Sailors’ Suburb] would yield her a husband. It was the night of her Vladivostok debut that she noticed him: Almost regal in the penguin white and black of his tuxedo, his dark hair meticulously slicked back, Nikolay smoked with such a casual nonchalance during the intermission that Vera couldn’t bear to take her eyes away from him. After a two week romance in Vladivostok and a passionate rail trip to Khabarovsk, where they kissed under willows and skipped stones in the Amur River, Vera and Nikolay were engaged to be married, and together wove the fabric of one of Eastern Siberia’s most important families.

2. Marla Upthegrove wasn’t like her sister, even though for years she couldn’t walk through Immokalee without being hailed as Laura. Laura herself fell in love with John Ashley, leader of the notorious Ashley Gang, and met her doom when Federal Agents clotheslined her and John’s car with a heavy chain on a causeway near Wabasso. But Marla wasn’t like that. She wanted a man with ambition. She wanted a man who’d give her a fat belly, not a fat lip. She found her saviour at Laura’s funeral in Sebastian. Kelly Runnels had come over from Fellsmere to negotiate a parcel of land near the headwaters of the St. John’s River with Tom Watson, land agent. A posse had gathered up the remains of Laura and John and was parading them through town, and Marla’s daddy had come to claim Laura and set her bones to rest. Kelly had stopped just outside of Watson’s office on Orange Avenue to watch the ensuing fiasco, and it was then when he first laid eyes upon the women he knew he’d marry. She was barefoot in a yellow sundress, her chestnut locks bouncing on her tanned shoulders, a white band across her nose shining where 18 years of sunlight had taken its toll. She appeared to be crying. Kelly fumbled in his pocket for his comb, hastily parted and re-parted his hair, and made tracks across the dirt road to see what was the matter with his bride-to-be.

3. Elly Adler was a true Conch. Not a marine gastropod—she was a native Key Wester. And she was a beautiful native. Her ancestors had come down from Cape Sable in the 18^th century and set up shop as wreckers and buttonwood coal dealers, scavenging the beach at Cayo Hueso for whatever they could find. Her father eventually found his mother lode, which was several chests of glistening dubloons tangled up in the thick mangroves of one of the out islands of the Marquesas. Elly was but a babe in arms, but her future was set out for her in the shimmering Spanish gold. The new wealth bought the Adlers the luxury of time, time to spend with each other and with the world around them, and with this luxury Papa Adler taught Elly the wisdom of the deep blue sea that ran quick and thick in her veins. When she emerged as the only survivor from her family of the Great Hurricane of 1849, she was devastated particularly by the loss of her beloved teacher, her father, and she took up her inheritance and left the dark blue waters of the lower keys for the brilliant newness of Walker’s Cay, Abaco. There at Walker’s, in a saloon called Rosie’s, Elly first met the man with large, rough hands, the handsome unshaven man with gentle learned eyes, her man, the man who would show her again the tremendous energy and passion of her wet and salty blood, and the Bahamas haven’t been the same since.

"Shocking, isn't it , Love?" -Eds

Paul S. BLOOD

When Platitudes Lie, Platitudes Die

2004-11-10T18:53:00.000-04:00

It's Winter. You're down for the Winter. Your girlfriend's aunt used to live in Bal Harbour but she died. When she died she left the condo to your girlfriend. Sometimes you come in off the beach and your girlfriend is in her aunt's kitchen trying to make margaritas, her erect nipples worrying holes through the tight white lycra of her bikini top and you can't handle it. You yank the bikini briefs down to her ankles and thrust into her from behind, pushing her hard up against the glass window, looking down onto the white sandy beach and the turquoise water. Her breasts and belly are pancaked against the glass and her wet mouth searches for yours but you push her face back into the glass and you pump away. When you come you come in her mouth, on her face, and on the glass. You leave your jizz dripping down the glass, the turquoise ocean in the background illuminating its whiteness, for the maid to clean up.

"This one's for the book, fuck." -Eds

Paul S. BLOOD

A Blessed Union?

2004-11-09T13:21:00.000-04:00

"Hold on now...what time is it? How long have I been asleep?"

Things would be easier now had there been some kind of event. Had it happened on a Sunday afternoon in a four-poster bed with the TV on in the background. Or better yet, in a laboratory with a turkey-baster and a team of experts standing by.

Or even if it had been a mistake. A mistake is a thing you can point to. There would've been evidence: a stain on the upholstery, a broken prophylactic. We would say: Somebody came inside somebody else and drama ensued.

Stories like that make sense. They happen all the time.

But things were more complicated (of course they were complicated) and whatever happened happened in the dark. Who can say, now, who was involved? Who spoke first? Who dove in? Who watched from the sidelines with night-vision goggles, timid and wrapped in a sweater? I can remember a slip of the tongue, a slight of hand... But the details are a blur, too slick to stand on.

And now, a period of gestation. What are we waiting for? Fruit or a monster? A monster, for sure. Some ancient-looking thing. Some freakish amalgam of parts, born with a full set of teeth and two or three types of privates.

"We are civilized people. We must try to be very lucid and very honest. We are civilized and intelligent people." --from Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head

-Kathryn ROSE

A New New-Historicism

2004-11-03T03:13:00.000-04:00

The Softest Lips Tell the Most Precious Secrets

* * *

With the years I grow fat in my small bed with smelly sheets. I sit here and smell the tears, the smelly tears in the dense and bejewelled fabric of my middling-to-poor existence in the North.

* * *

"Is the South dead to you?"

"The South is dead to me."

"When did the South die?"

* * *

The South died in the fall of years back, when the fall felt like Spring Garden in the Winter, when the Summer waned and gave way to an autumnal frost. The South died for me in the unremarkable descent of a Western sunset. The sun died when the Northern Lights overcame it and all we could do to miss the glare was stare East with glassy eyes.

* * *

"When did you stare East?"

"When my eyes were glassy."

"When did the South die?"

"Because my eyes turned glassy and drifted Easterly."

"When?"

"When. Yes."

* * *

We all moved East, all of us, and left nothing behind but scratched walls and smelly sheets. We all left and found solace where the sun sets in the West across a vast ocean.

* * *

"What is the translation from the German...er...Sturm und Drang? Oh yes. Angst." -Eds

with love, much BLOOD

Intruder

2004-11-02T21:20:00.000-04:00

When I’d come, I’d come in through the window.

You’d leave it open a crack (just a crack) and half-empty glasses of water would freeze on the sill. It would be 1:00 pm, 2:00pm, some ungodly hour. You'd be cowering in bed. Remember? I’d come in with burning cheeks, feeling vital in my sturdy boots, and I’d throw back the curtains, just for effect. Just to make an entrance. Just to piss you off. I’d throw them back, and cold white light would come streaming in. The air would be painfully fresh. Really, it was unfair how cold and fresh that air could be--so sharp it hurt to breathe in. But it was the light that offended you most of all. It made the dust sparkle. It outlined the junk on your desk with terrifying precision. Oh, you’d do your best to keep it out--you’d squirm and wince, and hug the wall. But that thin wool blanket, those unwashed sheets—they never were much of a shield.

(At night he'd kiss her a madman's kiss in the stairwell that led to the basement. He’d pin her wrist, the pipes would hiss, and this was a game that they played.)

In the daytime our meetings were visitations. You’d be in bed like an invalid, and I’d come in all cruelty, all brightfaced concern--like a nurse come to empty the bedpan. It’s a beautiful day, I’d say, and you'd point to the frozen glass with your damaged eyes. As if that were enough. As if that said it all . The phone would ring, and you’d let it ring. This would go on for awhile.

(This was also a kind of game, and it seemed like different game, but it was really the same game all over again.)

When I'd leave, I'd leave you with the window open--with the frozen glass and the drill of the phone, with your thin thin blanket and your spoiled sheets, to be in your room alone.

Charming.

-Kathryn ROSE

(2) Ghost Stories

2004-11-01T17:38:00.000-04:00

speed demon

You want to get up to the speed that makes the car hum. That’s not very fast. A little vibrant buzz goes up yr. spine. Then the ocean is just ocean and the land is just land and that’s just the road in front of you. Countryland or oceanfront or skirting the marsh. Topography can go to hell! Everything is the blank vibrant hum that goes into yr. fingertips.
Because the road on its own, that’s a forlorn scene. That’s a lonely lamppost and a lonely pool of light. When you think about it, that tree there is yr. lonely ghost. Why, that cow is standing on its own.
This steering wheel could be my solitude.

(He was extremely competent at motor-cars and all that sort of thing. And surely she, Hester, was as complicated as a motor-car! Surely she had as many subtle little valves and magnetos and accelerators and all the rest of it, to her make-up! If only he would try to handle her as carefully as he handled his car! She needed starting, as badly as ever any automobile did. Even if a car had a self-starter, the man had to give it the right twist. Hester felt she would need a lot of cranking up, if ever she was to start off on the matrimonial road with Joe. And he, the fool, just sat in a motionless car and pretended he making heaven knows how many miles an hour.
-D.H. Lawrence, ‘In Love’.)

‘Vroom vroom vroom.’ –Eds.

the elephant-man

He was suffering from the heat and that was that. He was Jonah in the whale’s belly and the whale was in a bathtub. That’s how big and warm and unyielding he felt his body and how small he was really. The small part of him reached out for the waterjug and the big part of him was a sweaty heavy paw. The small part of him thought about flipping over the record, and conceded to the warmth of the day, the rubbery heat, and thirty blubbery pounds he was meant to lose. But not in this heat! He was ashamed of his body.

'Le phoque? Non. Le morse? Non. La baleine? Non. L'éléphant? C'est vrai.' -Eds

- Stuart MINT.

Southern Hospitality

2004-10-29T15:32:00.000-03:00

Down at home there's a nigger dying in a ditch. His nappy hair is matted with coagulated blood, his skull is cracked from a violent pistol-whipping, and his uneven breaths blow up little gusts of dust into the dry September air.

(Who pistol-whipped this old boy? It's invisible. It's an empire. It's the scourge of the South. Kyklos is a joke. The Klan is a sordid farce. The violence is symptomatic. It reaches deeper than any fraternity. It's innate violence. It's de facto violence. It's the violence of a people inable to forget for 140 years a war that devastated them. In the South White violence against Niggers is easily attributed to the angry violence perpetrated against them by the North. Is this an excuse? No, it's reality. Am I racist? Yes. Do I wish I wasn't? Yes. Violence materializes in many forms: pistol whippings are one blatantly obvious one. But can't a "lynching" happen with something so subtle as a sideways glance? Yes. The violence is so widespread. I hate queers, niggers, jews, and Roman Catholics. I HATE them. And so do you. You can't help it. You might not think you hate, but you do. Those of you who don't believe that you are as guilty of hatred as I am are the fullest of hate. You mask your hate. You cover up your true identity. Embrace it instead.)

Down at home there's a nigger dying in a ditch. The whites of his eyes seem to hang there in the dark, his teeth too, so white and devilish in the dry night air. He's in a coma in the darkness in a ditch on the side of a dirt road, left to die, left to be picked apart by buzzards in the morning before the sun cuts through the thin layer of mist, still alive in the black pitch of a coma he'll be devoured by scavengers and creeping things.

(I didn't pistol-whip him. I'd never hurt another living thing. I don't even hunt. But someone did. And I can't help but to say that I understand whoever did. I don't advocate it. I don't appreciate it. I understand it. This isn't our fault. Noone ever came in here with a team of psychologists to clean up the huge mess they left. No. They came in here with carpetbags and set up house to make big money off our humble heritage. Who is the slave now? We can't be responsible for reacting. We've been reacting for 140 years, and rightly so, godammit.)

Down at home there's a nigger dying in a ditch. Flecks of spittle glisten on his big pink lips and a cold sweat pours off of his unconscious brow. He shines, no, glimmers in the dry hot moonlight.

(I can promise you this, folks: This town needs change. This town needs understanding. A pistol-whipped nigger spells out our need for understanding. We need to get close to our nascent racism. Our feable attempts at understanding our modern condition have only helped us to mask the truest symptoms of who we are. We are white men. Let me help you build a white city. Let's make this city shine as the whitest in the South. Let's crown Clewiston as the glistening gem of Florida. Vote Maynard Toombs for Clewiston Mayor on November second.)

'Clewiston sparkles on the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee. A few summers ago a negro supposedly "suicided" in nearby Belle Glade, FL. When he was found hanging in his grandmother's back yard his hands were tied behind his back. In an interesting coincidence, the annual NAACP convention met in Miami Beach that Summer.' - Eds

-Paul S. BLOOD

In the Forest, A Desert

2004-10-22T13:17:00.000-03:00

My father, took me far away, into the woods, I never saw nothing like I saw that day. Into the woods. Don't look back. Can't look back. Won't look back. Blind and headfirst, into the woods, laurels scratching, sawing at the soft spots behind my knees. Twigs and acorns clog my nostrils and spiders crawl up my toes. Far way and into the woods.

And now, and then, in the darkest rooms with the brownest tile I'll look up and find you looking back, and with a happy heart these words you'll say ("our father bless this home today"), and smile, grin, and the brown tile will spill out and over onto the grass, and the outside comes in for a while, just to sit and think and rest. On a dirty couch on a dirtier porch you'll turn to me, with happy heart, and spill out too, filling the brown tile, the brownest tile, flooding it ankle-deep no knee-deep no hip-deep and I have to wear waders just to get through you. Grey grout turns red as you fill it up, your happy heart running out all over the floor.

Can't you picture it? November 1987, my father, he took me far away, into the woods, and I never saw nothing like I saw that day. Under the laurels, through the thick heat and light, under the hot hot sun a calloused hand traces down a tan chest with beads of sticky sweat, feeling out the ribs, one by one, rib...rib...rib...rib...until no more ribs are left, and there's nothing left but a little bit of white worsted, and the heat, and the sun, and for a while everyone seems breathless, everyone watching from outside, peering in under the canopy, as semen spurts out, drips, drops, spills out onto the dead leaves and mixes with them, tannic and bitter.

H.e O.ften M.asturbates O.utside forever from now on to be known as Paul S. BLOOD

(Only one of us might be a homo. The ballot is still out.)

(2) Poems of Regret

2004-10-15T15:26:00.000-03:00

* * *

You left me in the hands of the locals when you left me behind. Their routines are inscrutable. Obscure purpose, military regimes, and pickled beets. Monkish routines. This fall feels like Spring Garden in the wintertime.

We built a shrine to your departure when you left. Remember? You left things in the apartment. Samples of your handwriting. And you hopped on the plane, and the sky was vaster, brighter, thinner. We never had together empty hours in the day. Suddenly, the afternoon startles and falters. And the city has changed irrevocably. In the summer, the Citadel was a nipple. Really, it’s a windy piece of turf, empty and forlorn. That’s a fact. You see the fringe of the city and the harbour is disconnected from the sky. It repulses the light.

My only comfort is the deepening season. The night sky will stretch across the continent. Days become shorter and the nights are endless. Try to find comfort in that infinite darkness. I dare you to feel like yourself in the infinite blank. I dare you, miserable cunt.

(Our friend on the edge of the earth seems to have forgotten certain modern conveniences. Like electric light and entertainment, for example. Take a warm bath and relax. Hop on a plane yourself, or drive quickly in your car. – Eds.)

* * *

Q: I haven’t experienced sexual desire in years, possibly ever. I am happily married. My husband works hard. I work hard beside him in the field. He works harder and longer and I prepare the meals. (I am an emancipated feminist. However, certain divisions of labour, traditionally determined by the construction of ‘gender roles’ in society, are expedient to the cultivation of land. I live in rural Nova Scotia beside a windmill. If my husband were more ‘effeminate’ and I ‘more of a man’ (these of course are quaint patriarchal expressions that I use with reserve, marking the force of their oppressive potential) the roles would be reversed.) I am responsible for the chickens and the goats.
Food preparation in the country is no small task. My husband and I support local organic farms exclusively and try to be, as much as possible, self-sustaining. We live on a small organic farm, ‘off the grid’, in rural Nova Scotia. We do not raise free-range grain-fed cattle for example and thus swap skinned rabbits and eggs for milk, butter, and beef. A red pepper is a real delicacy in the summertime. One might be traded for several weeks’ worth of root vegetables. Which goes to show the intricacy of the local economy. There is a web of barter, a syndicate of preserves. The tasks are all-consuming.
My husband is broad-shouldered and strong. His hands are rough and parts of his feet appear to be rotting. There is an odour. I like the warmth of him beside me in the winter. But this is not an intimate arrangement. The blades of the windmill freeze tight in the cold. The lights dim and brighten erratically. Mostly, we use candles. There is an inch of ice in the washbasin in the morning. It’s a rural necessity.
Am I extending myself too far or not enough? My husband is the silent type and we rarely talk about these things.

- Canadian Under No auThority

in other words, stuart MINT

Love Letter

2004-10-06T21:09:00.000-03:00

Dearest M-

Think of this of it as a token. A gift for you so that you can read something and feel loved. A gift for me, too. A chance to talk to myself--to stroke myself, really--with you as the invisible recipient who justifies the act and makes it all OK. We're selfish, as usual. And secret exhibitionists. (I pee with the door open, sometimes, and think of you.) But this is only half of a conversation, and that's it's excuse. That's why it's circling on its string, going nowhere. O missing piece! O phantom limb! The honus is on you to finish my sentences…

If, in the end, we should come to some kind of conclusion, I’ll print off our correspondence and tie it with a ribbon and hide it under the bed. I'll read it when I'm thirty and remember what it was like to be me at twenty-one. And I'll think of you.

Love K.

First Post

2004-10-02T17:05:00.000-03:00

This is the first post.